Ec wrote:
joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Let's be clear. Many of the links in question are harassing Wikipedians by any reasonable definition. What Michael Moore did was harassment pure and simple.
It's wrong to pretend that your delusions are also those of others.
The call to arms against Wikipedia that appeared for a while on Moore's homepage was deeply questionable, and impossible to overlook. And while I have no desire to reopen that debate, the question for us as regards link removal in general is: if Michael Moore (or any notable figure) does something deeply questionable on his webpage, is it an appropriate sanction against that for Wikipedia to remove links from [[Michael Moore]] to Michael Moore's homepage? To many of us, it's drop-dead obvious that it's not appropriate (not to mention useless), but to others of us, it's equally clear that it's a blatantly obvious thing to do. It is difficult to reconcile these two viewpoints.
Michael Moore is not only a notable public figure, but what he's notable for is being a troublemaker. What he did to [[Roger B. Smith]] was quite arguably harassment, but of course he's celebrated for it. To the extent that Wikipedia has (a) become mainstream but (b) is still fallible, it's quite natural for Moore to criticize us, and in a characteristically Moorelike way. It would actually be wrong for Moore to *not* do that, so it becomes even harder (for me, anyway) to argue that Moore deserves sanction for it at all, let alone the ultimate death penalty of... having a link to his homepage removed.
Suppose Roger B. Smith had a publicly-editable wiki or blog, and Moore called on his readers to aggressively edit it. Would that be cause for us to delink Moore's homepage? Suppose Moore called for actual physical violence against Smith. Would that be cause? Suppose Moore posted Roger Smith's home address, and a picture of him, and called down a fatwa of death against him. Would that be cause for us to delink Moore's homepage?
And then, of course, there's the question of harassment transitivity. What Michael Moore did was harassment pure and simple, no question. But does that mean that to link to Michael Moore's home page is harassing of Wikipedians? That's much harder to argue.